But there had been no pursuit. It was almost impossible to have flown the millions of miles he had covered in free flight along a course beside another freely flying ship without diverging or converging. That would take corrective driving, and the radiation would flare in his detector. He had seen none. He was safe.
He spent his time figuring, and trying to fix the position of Ertene. He corrected his fix time after time, and prayed that he was right.
And when he detected the great, nonreflecting sphere in space with his converted detector, he shouted in joy.
He passed Ertene and went beyond detector range by twenty million miles. Then he broke his barrier and directed the lifeship to the center of the big barrier over Ertene. He closed his own barrier again and watched the blackness increase in size as he coasted toward it. He made contact, passed inside, and saw Ertene and the synthetic sun.
He kept his barrier on and approached the planet with the acceleration of falling bodies.
He hit the atmosphere and the falling velocity turned the silence of space-flight into a scream. He watched the pyrometers, and though the hull became hot, it did not become dangerously so. His velocity upon contact had been in thousands of feet per second, not miles, as would have been the case in a meteor.
The velocity dropped slightly; Guy calculated the terminal velocity of the lifeship at three hundred miles per hour, and with that in mind he began to figure furiously.